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All Long Beach is divided into eleven parts. They were established 50 years ago this summer when the post office’s newly created Mr. ZIP mascot sped across the country, dicing up states, cities and communities into ZIP codes, simplifying things for postal workers and complicating everyone else’s lives with more numbers to memorize in an increasingly numeralized age.

Starting today and continuing for the next 10 weeks, the Press-Telegram staff — reporters, photographers, designers and editors — will be looking at Long Beach ZIP code by ZIP code, starting with the oldest part of the city, downtown’s 90802.

There is a tremendous amount of demographic information on each ZIP, ranging from population and ethnicity to education and income levels, and while we’ll be including much of that information in our series, we’ll also be looking at the overall profile and personality of Long Beach’s neighborhoods as well as their historic districts, shopping areas and other points of interest.

The ZIPs in Long Beach are dependably indicative of the city’s disparate areas: 90802 includes downtown and the East Village; 90803 has Belmont Shore and Naples; 90804 encompasses the Rose Park and Zaferia areas; 90805 contains most of North Long Beach; 90806 has Poly High and the Wrigley neighborhoods; 90807 takes in Los Cerritos and Bixby Knolls; 90808 has the Plaza, the Ranchos and El Dorado Park Estates; 90810 includes much of the Westside; 90813 has Cambodiatown and the historic Willmore and Drake Park areas; 90814 is Alamitos Heights, and Fourth Street’s Retro Row; and 90815 is Los Altos and the Cal State Long Beach area.

Since 1943, residents of large cities had grown accustomed to one- or two-digit postal zones that were established to help inexperienced postal employees sort the mail when the war effort had taken thousands of the seasoned sorters. If you lived in downtown Long Beach back then, your address would be, say, 214 Tree Ave., Long Beach, 2, Calif.

Until the 1960s, mail was made up mostly of personal letters. Postcards, notes — the kind of mail you don’t get at all anymore. Computers came along, you may recall, allowing companies to bat out bills and statements in huge numbers, flooding the Post Office. It became a requirement, first for businesses and then for everyone, to include a five-digit ZIP code — ZIP being an acronym for Zone Improvement Plan — with every piece of correspondence.

Fifty years later, ZIP codes continue to make life easier for the Postal Service, and that remains their chief purpose, but it has also become a key tool for demographers. ZIP codes are used by the nation’s 9-1-1 emergency system, marketers use it extensively as do the real estate and insurance industries. And the U.S. Census breaks down its demographic information by ZIP code.

There are other ZIP codes within Long Beach. The so-called “unique” ZIPs were assigned to companies and organizations that receive a large volume of mail. These days they’re rarely issued, but there still some 5,000 unique ZIPs nationwide.

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In Long Beach, for instance, the Press-Telegram’s ZIP is 90844. Others unique ZIPs include 90840 (Cal State Long Beach), 90842 (Department of Gas and Water), 90846 (Boeing Company), and 90847 and 48 (AARP).